Mark Mancall oral history recording

I was about to email Mark Mancall to ask him a question about George Kerr, but I was saddened to find out that he passed away in 2020. Dr. Mancall was a brilliant and thoughtful man--I had a chance to talk to him once back in 2017.

Linked to the obituary is an oral history interview of Mancall. I'm listening to it now where he's talking about his experience studying with John King Fairbank. At around 10 minutes, he talks about how when he was student teaching at Harvard, Fairbank would stand in the back of the classroom and imitate him! Fairbank also made Mancall chop wood. (Beginning to sound like Mr. Miyagi...)

Dennis Kwok talk at Northeastern University

Dennis Kwok (郭榮鏗), who is a visiting scholar at Northeastern, participated in a conversation with Professor Mai'a Cross today entitled, "The Rise of China, the Fall of Hong Kong, and the Implications for the Taiwan Strait." In case you're not familiar with him (I wasn't), he was one of the founding members of the Civic Party in Hong Kong and was in HK's Legislative Council (LegCo, which I finally learned how to pronounce--with a soft "g") from 2012 to 2020. He was forced out of LegCo in 2020, after which he left Hong Kong. He is called a scholar in exile and says he currently has no plans to return to Hong Kong. 

He gave what I thought was a fairly modest/humble narrative of his own changing perspective on the fate of Hong Kong over the years, admitting that when he started out as a moderate democrat, he hoped, like many people, that "one country, two systems" would work for Hong Kong. Like many others, he said he didn't know quite what to make of Xi Jinping when Xi took over China--Xi's father was a reformer, so people were hopeful that he would be a reformer, too. The events of 2014-present changed Kwok's mind, and he doesn't have much optimism now for Hong Kong or for China. His only point of optimism: "I believe that authoritarianism simply doesn't work. ... Humans want to be free." 

About Taiwan, he warned, "You'd better take it seriously" when Xi indicates he won't leave the Taiwan issue to the next generation of Chinese rulers. Citing Kevin Rudd, Kwok called Taiwan "the holy grail" of CCP politics. It's Xi's political legacy. Kwok said that he has gone to many conferences and meetings where Taiwan is discussed, and the key question that no one asks is, "What do the Taiwanese people want?" They're the ones who are going to be doing the fighting. (I've seen this written a lot, like by writers like New Bloom founder Brian Hioe, but somehow hearing it said out loud 讓我紅了眼眶...) He said that the most painful lesson Hongkongers learned was through the events leading up to and including the National Security law. People should have protested 30 years ago, he said, when the British signed Hong Kong over to the PRC. You can't rely on outsiders to defend you. You have to defend yourself. This reminded me of the preface to Chen Rong-cheng's 1973 translation of Formosa Betrayed, where Chen wrote, ｢人不先自救，誰會救我？｣. The more things change, ...

Monday morning, week four of classes

I'm listening to workmen playing Steely Dan and tearing out some rotten wood from the soffit. ("Soffit" is a word I just learned a couple of weeks ago from my 94-year-old mother.) 

[Update, 9/29: They're now playing the Eagles, interspersed with other music primarily from the '70s. Still some Dan in the mix.

When I was in college in the '80s I was amazed at one administrator's knowledge of the music of the '50s. Now I'm in that administrator's position regarding music that's almost 50 years old rather than "only" 30 years old. Yikes.]

A break from COVID and CANVAS

I was going to post a thoughtful note on George H. Kerr's perspective on the April 24, 1970 assassination attempt on Chiang Ching-kuo, but I'm burned out on COVID-19 news and transferring my Blackboard materials to Canvas for my first summer class that begins May 4. So I'm going to relax with this video, which I just encountered. Apologies if you've seen it before:

Oh, and on a vaguely related note...

The pastors in the churches from my fundamentalist upbringing are saying, "Aha! I told you so!"

And when I saw this new item, I immediately thought of this:

(Don't think those pastors would appreciate the song, though...)

My son, the philosopher

My four-year-old, looking at a black and white picture of people:

Blackberries, strawberries, blueberries. They lost their colors. Without their colors, they're not yummy anymore.

"Speak power to truth"

As I'm writing this, students in Taiwan are occupying the Legislative Yuan, the parliament in Taiwan, to protest the ruling party's attempt to run through a service trade agreement with China that many fear would harm Taiwan's economy. I have been keeping up with the events through Facebook, reading posts by various people I know and don't know who write or show pictures of the events of the protests, and I feel connected to these events and proud of the students who have stood up for their futures in a way that makes me proud to say that I used to live there. 


I started this blog 10 years ago today (well, actually yesterday) with posts about the 2004 Taiwan presidential election and the protests that took place after that. Now Taiwan is at another turning point in its history, and I hope that this is a time when more people in the world listen to the voices of the people rather than those of the people in power who don't have the interests of the people at heart. A former classmate of mine from Syracuse, Seth Kahn, mentioned to me tonight that rhetoric scholar Lee Artz wrote in a book about activist rhetorics that Seth co-edited that our job is not to "speak truth to power" because the powerful know the truth; the problem is that they don't care. The task facing us, he wrote, is to "speak power to truth." As Artz writes, "Rather than communicating with those in power who benefit from the already known truth of inequality, humanity could be better served by conversations for change among those who would benefit from creating new truths, new powers." This is what I hope is happening in Taiwan, and if it is happening and continues happening, I have hope for Taiwan.

東北大學的多語言環境

我剛跟一個韓國學生聊天了(聊了天？)。她說她會講四種語言，以前覺得還不錯，可是來到東北大學以後認識了一些會講七種語言的同學!我覺得自己很糟糕，連一種外語也沒有學好......

試用中文寫部落格

如果你/妳受不了看下面的菜中文，不要怪我，都是因為Paul Kei Matsuda前天在他的演講中叫我們用第二語言試寫一篇有關我們學生的文章。他大概要我們了解留學生每次用英文寫報告要面臨的挑戰。我寫了三句非常簡單的句子就放棄了。因為Paul這樣的提醒，我就決定用中文寫部落格。

Who's a pig?

This won't make any sense if you don't know that in Chinese, "pork" is called "pig meat" (豬肉)...

I won't mention where this happened (I don't want to go to jail), but for lunch today we went to a restaurant where one of us ordered a pork dish and the other ordered beef. When the clerk came over to our table with our food, she wasn't sure who had ordered what, so she asked (for some strange reason), "你們兩個,誰是豬?" (Basically, "Which one of you two is a pig?")

Well, I was chewing my cud when she asked, so obviously it wasn't me...

Comp/Oral I debate contest

I just finished judging a debate contest in which students from the Composition and Oral Practice I classes at Tunghai (first-year English majors) debated the resolution, "Mainland Chinese students should be allowed to apply to universities in Taiwan." We listened to three debates on this topic today.

I have to say I value the opportunity to hear what first-year students have to say about this issue. They brought up some interesting points, illustrating, perhaps, some of their own anxieties about education in Taiwan. They evidently frequently hear about how hardworking students in China are--several groups mentioned stories about Chinese students studying under streetlights when the dorm lights go out, for instance, and compared these stories with examples of university students in Taiwan who play computer games and chat on MSN all night long. (Evidently Mr. Ma has mentioned this at some point in his argument in favor of allowing Chinese students here.) In the end, I found my own point of view about this issue complicated a bit by what they said.

I found, not surprisingly, things to criticize about the students' debates, but also things to praise, like the way many of them arranged their arguments, rebutted opponents' arguments, and cited sources. One thing I forgot to say, that I wish I had the opportunity to say to them, is that we teachers sometimes forget that what we ask students to do is something that has taken us years to be able to achieve. (This is true at least in my case. I'm still terrible at impromptu speaking!) So my hat's off to the students and teachers of Comp/Oral I this year!

--------
Michael Turton asked about the arguments students were making in the debates, so I thought I'd mention some of them here. I'm just listing some out here without comment. Also, some arguments might overlap.

For allowing Chinese students to apply:

1. Will stimulate/promote cultural exchange between Chinese and Taiwanese students
2. Will promote cultural understanding between Chinese and Taiwanese society
3. Can give students from the PRC a chance to live and learn in a more open society
4. Will help promote colleges in Taiwan that have declining enrollments
5. Will help internationalize education in Taiwan by encouraging foreign students to apply
6. If we accept students from other countries, why not accept students from China?
7. Will help motivate Taiwanese students to work harder (the Mr. Ma argument)
8. Will bring more elite students here from China

Those were most of the more frequently cited "pro" arguments the students made. As Sam Spade says, "Maybe some of them are unimportant - I won't argue about that - but look at the number of them. And what have we got on the other side?" Well, let's take a look:

For not allowing Chinese students to apply:

1. Will require Taiwan to provide Chinese students with scholarships, causing a further drain on the educational budget
2. Schools with declining enrollments are not high quality, so should be allowed to close
3. Students coming to Taiwan from China might not be all that elite (especially if they're sent to low-ranked schools)
4. Will result in a lot of illegal labor from China (workers pretending to be students)
5. Could result in legal problems concerning whether students from China are to be considered "international" or "domestic"

There was some interesting back-and-forth related to a lot of these assertions, including citations (on both sides) of examples from other countries like the U.S. and Belgium. A lot of discussion centered around who was going to have to pay for their attendance in Taiwan's universities and why we should or should not (or even can) prop up schools with declining enrollments by 'importing' students from China. There was some grudging acceptance of the idea that bringing students over could contribute to cultural exchange and understanding, but the "cons" rejected the idea that bringing in students from China would encourage more international students to come.

One thing I wanted to hear that I didn't hear until the very end was a number: how many Chinese students are we talking about? No one had a clear number for how many might be accepted to Taiwan, but one "pro" debater mentioned that in Hong Kong, only 205 of the 2000 Chinese students who applied in 2005 were accepted. This eased my mind a bit--some of the "con" debaters' arguments made me think that perhaps we were talking about allowing millions of students in. (One person on the "con" side expressed concern about traffic problems that might be caused by an influx of Chinese students!)

[Update, 23 June 2008]

Naming Taiwan's ruling party

Just something I noticed--don't know if anyone else did: during his visit to China, Wu Po-hsiung used the full name of the KMT: 中國國民黨 (Chinese [or "China"] Nationalist Party) a lot. Every time I saw a clip of him talking, "中國國民黨" (rather than simply "國民黨") would come out of his mouth. I suppose part of the reason for this would be that his immediate audience, the CCP officials he was meeting with, would appreciate Wu's embrace of the 中國 in the name of the island's ruling party after the years of "去中國化" that we were supposedly experiencing here and that probably had the CCP folks there wringing their hands (along with the KMT folks here).

It's interesting, though, to think about Wu's embrace of "中國國民黨" in light of the attempts to "localize" the KMT during the election--Ma's "long stays" and frequent use of Taiwanese, and the de-emphasis on the "中國" part of the party's name (though not to the point of changing its official name). The other interesting thing to think about will be what the KMT will call itself locally from here on out--will "中國" be used more, say, on local election posters, banners, etc.?

Yang Tianshi's talk about CKS's diaries

Prof. Yang Tianshi, who was visiting Taiwan for a conference at Tunghai that took place over the weekend, gave a talk today about Chiang Kai-shek's diaries, which are currently deposited in the archives of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Prof. Yang and the moderator of today's talk, Lu Fang-shang, discussed quite a few topics related to the use of Chiang's diaries in historical research. I'm going to try to read my hen-scratchy notes and see what I can make out of their talk. (By the way, Yang and Lu were interviewed recently for an article in Yazhou Zhoukan.)

Prof. Yang described the diaries, mentioning that CKS rather consistently kept a diary between 1915 and 1972 (3 years before his death). He said that at first, CKS's entries were brief (about 30 characters in length), but got longer around the time of the war with Japan. He noted that CKS also engaged in weekly, monthly, and yearly summaries/reflections.

A screen shot of two pages from one of Chiang's diaries.
(There's a short article about Chiang's diaries here.)

Prof. Yang argued that Chiang's diaries were written mainly for himself rather than being written with an eye to future publication. He said that two key pieces of evidence for this are how much CKS cursed (罵) people close to him, and how much private, even confessional, material is in the diaries. (CKS used to give himself demerits for looking lustily at women.) Prof. Yang argued that CKS would not have wanted this kind of material to be made public. (BTW, as Prof. Lu mentioned, the confessions and self-criticism in CKS's diaries didn't necessarily turn him into a saint...) One result of the private nature of Chiang's diaries, according to Prof. Yang, is that we can learn a lot more about what was really going on in CKS's head at certain important historical moments, such as the 1926 Zhongshan Warship Incident and the 1936 Xi'an Incident.

One thing I wondered about is the role of CKS's diaries in subject formation, and the models that CKS had for his diaries. Prof. Yang mentioned the long history of figures in China who used diaries as tools for self-cultivation. He also discussed how well-read CKS was (particularly, he said, for a military man). Evidently CKS's diaries record his readings in the Confucian classics (particularly the Yijing), Christian works, and Eastern and Western philosophy. I found myself wondering what someone in writing studies or rhetorical studies would do with these diaries--perhaps analyze how the diaries constructed CKS as a reading and writing subject.

One last thing that Prof. Yang mentioned--he said that Chiang's status has risen in China from that of a devil (鬼) to a human (人), while in Taiwan, coincidentally, it seems his status has gone from god to human. (No one commented on the immediate political conditions that might be responsible for that coincidence.)

All in all, Professor Yang's speech was quite engaging--the room was packed, too (though I had the feeling a lot of students were there because they had to be. Ahem...)

ICRT's oral histories

Has anyone been listening to the "oral histories" that Rick Monday has been featuring this week on ICRT? Evidently he's been interviewing American expats who have lived in Taiwan for a long time. I only caught one--today--as I was driving to work this morning. (I know, it's embarrassing to admit that I listen to ICRT, but it was either that or Rum, Sodomy & the Lash for about the 5,000th time.)

Today, Rick was interviewing Doris Brougham (of Studio Classroom fame) and a gentleman whose name I didn't catch. They were having a grand old time praising the virtues of the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek. Now I respect the fact that they have been in Taiwan a lot longer than I have, but some of their comments didn't reflect very well on them, in my view.

Particularly odd was a comment that I believe Dr. Brougham made when they were discussing the dismantling of Chiang statues. Her statement was to the effect that people in the South (by which she meant the southern U.S.) didn't take down statues of Lincoln just because the South lost the Civil War. Besides the very strange equation of Chiang and Lincoln, her comment made me wonder how many Lincoln statues there are in the South that could have been torn down. According to this article, the first statue of Lincoln in one of the former Confederate states was unveiled in 2003. So it's not like carpet-baggers put up dozens of statues of Lincoln after the Civil War that are available for tearing down.

I think a more comparable controversy concerning tradition (they used the word "traditional" to defend the Chiang statues), public memory, and remembering vs. honoring would be the statues of Lenin in Russia. Would Dr. Brougham defend keeping Lenin's statues up because it's "tradition"?

That said, I wish I could have heard more of the oral histories they have been conducting. Wonder if ICRT will release a CD or have them available on their website?